Enhance recoverable_problem to require/allow a description of what the problem is

Bug #1267919 reported by James Hunt
8
This bug affects 1 person
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Apport
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Bug Description

Apport supports filing RecoverableProblem reports. These are not crashes, although they do still get created as *.crash.

I'd like to suggest we do 2 things:

1) enhance /usr/share/apport/recoverable_problem to require some sort of human-readable description of what the problem is since currently it is entirely up to the caller to set some key/value pairs. An example from a recent RecoverableProblem report:

<snip>
ProblemType: RecoverableProblem
DuplicateSignature: icon-path-unhandled-com.ubuntu.notes_notes_1.4.235
</snip>

This makes perfect sense to the a very small number of folk, but makes no sense to anyone else :) For interested readers the above actually means, "an icon exists that is not configured".

How about we add an option to recoverable_problem so that it would/could get called as:

/usr/share/apport/recoverable_problem --description <mandatory_description_of_problem> key=value [key=value...]

/usr/share/apport/recoverable_problem "an icon exists that is not configured (<path_to_icon>)" \
    DuplicateSignature icon-path-unhandled-com.ubuntu.notes_notes_1.4.235

That would then generate a report containing in this case:

ProblemType: RecoverableProblem
RecoverableProblemReason: "an icon exists that is not configured (<path_to_icon>)"
DuplicateSignature: icon-path-unhandled-com.ubuntu.notes_notes_1.4.235

2) Write RecoverableProblems to *.info files rather than *.crash. I appreciate that this could require quite a bit of work since it would require changes to atleast apport and whoopsie but since these reports are not crashes, I do not think the file should end with .crash as that looks alarming and is strictly incorrect.

Revision history for this message
James Hunt (jamesodhunt) wrote :

For reference, this bug came out of bug 1267882, originally reported against Upstart. However, all the crashes attached to that bug are in fact RecoverableProblems with no description.

Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

I haven't yet seen one of these errors in action, but <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ErrorTracker#app-requested> says that the secondary text for the error alert should be "developer-specified error text".

Does that text exist? And if it does, could we just use that?

(One reason I haven't seen a developer-specified error in action is that it doesn't yet have a test case in the spec.)

Revision history for this message
James Hunt (jamesodhunt) wrote :

Hi Matthew - if you look on bug 1267882, there are a number of these RecoverableProblem reports attached. None contain the "developer-specified" tag from what I can see.

I personally don't mind what the new field is called as long as it makes it relatively obvious what the detected problem was.

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